Get Creative, Think Inside the Box: Lessons from SHRM 2010
The last thing you might expect to hear when walking into a presentation about how to inspire creativity from your employees is: “Tell your employees to think inside the box”…and yet, that’s pretty much the advice Disney’s business program consultant, Scott Milligan, had for the audience when he presented at SHRM 2010 in San Diego last month.
“We tell our cast members to think INSIDE the box,” Milligan boasted to the audience of HR professionals during his presentation, “Disney’s Approach to Inspiring Creativity”. (“Cast members,” by the way, is Disney’s term for employees.) After all, he reasoned, how creative is it, really, to tell people to “think outside the box” anymore? (Finally, someone said it!)
The other surprising thing about this idea of “thinking inside the box” is that it seems awfully practical and structured for a company that prides itself on the very idealistic notions of making magic happen and dreams come true, etc…And yet, this structured approach works for Disney.
Thinking inside the box, Milligan said, provides companies guidance and direction, helps them avoid wasting resources and keeps everyone focused. But what is the box? As Milligan explained it, the box is your company’s organizational identity – who you are or what you intend to be – and it encompasses four things:
- Your Customers – Who are they? What do they need from you?
- Your Vision – What do you want to be?
- Your Mission – What do you want to do?
- Your Essence – How do we want people to feel when they experience your product or service?
Find Your Essence
A lot of companies, Milligan believes, leave essence out of the equation – and that, he explained, is an unfortunate oversight, especially when it comes to recruiting: In order to find the best people, hiring managers and recruiters must understand their company’s essence in order to seek out and identify the very people who share that essence.
As an example, he cited how Disney makes it a goal to create happiness for people. Milligan then challenged the audience to find their own companies’ essence, and look to that when hiring employees.
(When considering your company’s essence, it might help of it to think of it in terms of how blogger Derrick Daye defines essence: ”…the heart and soul of a brand – a brand’s fundamental nature or quality. Usually stated in two or three words, a brand’s essence is the one constant across product categories and throughout the world.”)
Structure, Not Confinement
Again, while you might think that a company that tells its employees to think inside the box would be fostering a culture of confinement, discouraging creative thinking by setting up rules and restrictions, the box model actually serves the opposite purpose for Disney – and it can do the same for others as well.
“Within that box, companies can expand their identity,” Milligan said, explaining how the box model has enabled Disney to expand its brand identity - from being merely about cartoons to also encompassing live action features and then expanding to theme parks, hotels and resorts and then even on to cruise lines – all while staying focused on the mission to enable “magic” to happen.
What do you think? Does your company think “inside the box” as well? Is essence something that you talk about or communicate at your company? How does it play into attracting and engaging employees?
